Built with open-source

XKCD’s posts on saving time and automation are precisely how this blog came to be. Until now, I never had the time or motivation to write on a regular basis, though I considered it often. I’ve been developing for iOS for a few years now and I’ve become increasingly involved in the Objective-C open-source community via GitHub and CocoaPods, and was lucky enough to attend (my first!) WWDC this year on its 25th anniversary. It was an awesome experience. With that said, I can’t think of a better time or better reason to begin writing about my experiences with iOS and Objective-C (and now Swift), as well as my involvement in open-source. I hope to share worthwhile and interesting things here.

This site

For this site, I did not want a blogspot or tumblr or wordpress site. I wanted to build a site and manage it myself. I wanted control and I wanted it to be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. And I wanted it to be open-source.

This site is lovingly powered by Jekyll, Bootstrap, and Font Awesome, and it is generously hosted via GitHub Pages — all of which are built on and influenced by open-source.

Open-source

This world would be significantly different without the concept of open-source, which is an idea that has been around for millennia. Though it was not always referred to as “open-source”, the core ideas persist. Only through the processes of sharing, collaboration, and reciprocity did our ancestors establish a stable, thriving society. It is this kind of openness and cooperation that has fostered our thriving community of programmers. Whether or not we can describe it as stable, I’ll leave up to you. Nearly all of the software in-use today was built on, supported by, or influenced by open-source software. It would be naive to think that the different technologies and apps that we take for granted every single day would be here without that help.

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

— Isaac Newton (or Bernard of Chartres, if you’re hip with French philosophers)

Future posts will focus on iOS, Cocoa, Objective-C, Swift, and open-source.